This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

by Daniel J. Levitin

Musicians also use chunking in several ways. First, they tend to encode in memory an entire chord, rather than the individual notes of the chord; they remember “C major 7” rather than the individual tones C - E - G - B, and they remember the rule for constructing chords, so that they can create those four tones on the spot from just one memory entry. Second, musicians tend to encode sequences of chords, rather than isolated chords. “Plagal cadence,” “aeolian cadence,” “twelve-bar minor blues with a V-I turnaround,” or “rhythm changes” are shorthand labels that musicians use to describe sequences of varying lengths. Having stored the information about what these labels mean allows the musician to recall big chunks of information from a single memory entry. Third, we obtain knowledge as listeners about stylistic norms, and as players about how to produce these norms. Musicians know how to take a song and apply this knowledge—schemas again—to make the song sound like salsa, or grunge, or disco, or heavy metal; each genre and era has stylistic tics or characteristic rhythmic, timbral, or harmonic elements that define it. We can encode those in memory holistically, and then retrieve these features all at once.